Time, emotion and work

It's time that corporations treat the time and feelings of workers as if they were as important as the time and feelings of customers. They are.

A Great Enemy of Children

A great enemy of children is emotional abuse and time exploitation in the workplace. That abuse may trickle down from work to the family and become domestic abuse. Kids don't work for money, but they may be a convenient outlet for domination by dominated adults with heightened stress levels and lowered patience with the energy and irreverence of children. I believe this is a fundamental problem in culture and a major reason for mental illness, addiction and behavioral dysfunction in kids and adults.

Adult responses to this issue fall into three categories: one minimizes, in the way an abused spouse minimizes the bruises and mental scars. Cliches of parenting are offered which feel (and are) shallow and dismissive; work language merges with "dad-speak", and emotions are dismissed as non-relevant. Another expresses grief, regret, guilt and shame at self for accepting workplace abuse and sacrificing irreplaceable time with family. Another channels anger toward corporate culture and demands answers and changes, so that the family is protected from external drivers of internal dysfunction. The first response habit is rooted in toxic denial, the second is sadly healing, and the third empowering.

It is clear which response habit is in charge of things at this point in our cultural evolution, and it might be time to ask if the world of money and work is a sort of religion demanding child sacrifice to adult fear and greed. The dangers of fundamentalist religion are fairly obvious, but fundamentalist workaholism is subtly corrosive and the effects take longer to manifest in behavior. If you believe I'm exaggerating, simply imagine if nobody in a corporate chain were being paid but were promised "salvation". How would their behavior seem, in contrast to a cult? This mental exercise can be both disturbing and enlightening, and may provide ideas for transforming what we've collectively created to sustain our lifestyles.

Observations from a childcaring role

Having spent a couple weeks as a home-dude, taking care of a seven-year-old and organizing around the house, I'm really stricken by the irony and unfairness of what used to be termed "women's work" being pretty much a managerial position (with hyperactive, forgetful employees you can't fire, who require frequent hand-holding and personalized attention that executives find burdensome) that is paid far less than the equivalent work done in an office building.

Most often it is women who end up poor and struggling, responsible for the most important "job" for society, that of not messing up a kid's brain while their little synapses wire up, when their partners move on to greener pastures as their own work experience gives them more opportunities and access to mates. Those women (and the growing number of men who prefer being home-dudes) are often shamed for accepting government aid and ashamed to show a food card in line at the supermarket; they receive no credit and miniscule financial compensation for a job equivalent to running a small business with a shoestring budget and entertaining but unmanageable ADHD employees.

 I'm glad more men are getting that experience, because it's only by doing someone else's work that you really understand what kind of work it is and what sort of recognition it deserves. I'm glad it's work I'm happy doing, but I wouldn't expect corporate overachievers to have any respect for it. Many would scrutinize my "man card" and accuse me of lacking drive and goals. They would not say, "You've shown adaptability, problem-solving, communication and personnel management, resource management, time organization, and responsibility with a great attitude. You need to work for us, it's hard to find people with those skills."

For me, the admiration of a tiny human and the affection of her mom is more than enough. But for women abandoned in divorce whose lack of proportional compensation and recognition forces them to take on exhausting and stressful second jobs without benefits rather than executive perks and rewards, there is an extra burden. And that is grossly unjust, given the level of blaming and shaming of poor single moms and "unemployed", attentive dads. The "entitlements" offered by government hardly cover what their contribution to the world is worth, yet many would say they aren't trying hard enough, because they're not being compensated in high-status ways.

"In an age struggling between crises of economic overproduction, environmental catastrophe, falling salaries and increasing robotisation, there cannot be any other explanation for the current culture of "hard work" than that of a burgeoning religious cult.

Yet work is hardly devoid of ideological content. As we do it and understand it today, work has become in itself the very essence of ideology: the act of willingly submitting the short time allowed to us by our mortality, to an all-encompassing, faceless abstraction. In the words of Guetta, we work endlessly because it is "the only thing we know how to do". What really matters, and really defines us as worthy people – unlike those benefit scroungers – is that we keep working hard, regardless of whether our work goes towards the production of land mines, the deforestation of the Amazon forest or the supply of frog-shaped slippers to gadget shops. Abstaining from work, or being forcefully cast out of it, puts one in the dangerous position of a stateless person during a war, or of an atheist in a theocracy."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/britney-spears-bitch-work-religion